Chapter 5: Lacquer (Part 1)

Ah-eugh!

Instead of putting a hole through his skull, the wooden bullet struck the back of Milo’s tongue and rolled into his throat.

His teeth clacked on the barrel.

Seeing Layla and Henry spin around at the bang, he wrenched the pistol away from his mouth.

Heat bloomed behind his breastbone as his stomach retched, trying and failing to force the lump back up.

What the fuck.

Air squeezed in around the obstruction, every breath returning as a wet whistle. Bent double in the road, he tasted iron where the cut on his cheek had split open again.

Boots hammered down the road and four hands found his shoulders.

"M-Milo?" Henry yelled. "Boy, are you okay?"

"What did you do?" Layla’s grip closed on his sleeve.

"I—I—" Milo coughed, bringing up a splatter of spit. "I... UGH!"

At the next cough, his knees hit the road. Pain shot up from his bad ankle. The pistol fell onto the ground.

Water came up, flecks of road ash followed, but the wooden ball stayed down.

I missed. Inward.

"Layla!" Henry gasped. "Call for help!"

Layla ran ahead, pulling out her phone.

"No, no..." Milo raised a hand. "I’m okay. Really."

"Where are you hit?" The instructor shook him by both shoulders. "Did you leave a bullet in the chamber? Did you leave a bullet in the chamber?!"

A stray shot. The excuse had come out of the man’s own mouth, and Milo nodded.

"Layla!" he called after her. "No help! I can shout after you, see? I wasn’t shot!"

She doubled back with the phone in her hand.

The last of Henry’s color drained away, and his hands came off Milo’s shoulders.

"So it is that..."

"No—"

"It’s the Plague..."

"It is not the Plague!" Milo forced himself upright, voice in shreds. "I was merely..."

Beside his shoulder, the crumpled sheet flickered into the air, taking every word he had lined up with it.

"Easy!" Henry pulled him steady. "Take a slow breath. Air is moving. You’re breathing."

While Milo’s lungs fought for a clean breath, fresh ink formed on the crumpled paper with a dry scritch-scritch.

[ Absorption complete. ]

[ Consumed: Wooden Pistol Bullet. ]

[ Trait: Quake. ]

[ Authorships & The Innate Column & Mercies Discovered (!) ] 𓂃🖋

"Consumed?" he rasped.

The word set off another gag.

When he came back up, both stares had settled on the sheet. Witnesses, finally. Unless the Plague was further along than anyone knew.

"Wooden pistol," she sighed.

"What?"

"Why is it showing it again? Grade: Crude. Type: Arms."

Milo checked both of his companions faces over the rim of the yellowed paper, mouth hanging open.

Those words weren’t on his page.

"Longevity: Null. You fired it again." Henry let go of his shoulder and scooped the pistol from the grass. "I’m taking this. Do you realize what could have happened?!"

Gaze fixed on the sheet, Milo wiped the corners of his lips on his sleeve. "What did you do to me?"

"We didn’t do anything!" Layla snapped. "You fired a gun behind us, and where is the bullet? You claim you weren’t shot, which I believe because you’re standing there looking miserable. Where is it?"

The ink transformed itself into new strings of words.

[ You have received the Blessing of Authorship. ]

[ Authorship allows for Communion, which sprouts the Calamity Tree. ] 𓂃🖋

"Tree?" Milo asked.

Henry searched the roadside. "What tree?"

"The Calamitous one."

A cool, soft palm landed on his forehead.

"He’s delirious."

[ Once claimed, a Calamity ceases to exist as an independent entity and takes root within you as a developing Calamity Tree. ] 𓂃🖋

"Ceases to exist...?"

Calamities outlasted everything; on that one point every priest and every scavenger shook hands. Endure, evacuate, rebuild. The author of this page had skipped some very basic schooling.

"Your pulse is fast," the instructor said, two fingers at Milo’s wrist. "Layla, stop touching his face."

She yanked her hand back and wiped it on her coat. "You think it’s the Plague."

"We treat it like the Plague."

Being treated like the Plague, he suspected, came with the same locked ward as having it.

[ Absorption converts a relic into growth for the corresponding claimed Calamity. ] 𓂃🖋

"Vomiting, coughing..." Layla lowered her head. "I apologize, sir. Milo might have the Plague."

"Apology accepted." Henry steered the girl back a step. "We may not be infected with the Plague yet."

[ A Mercy may be preserved; other properties are converted into raw growth. ] 𓂃🖋

"That’s a lot of nouns for one swallowed ball," Milo muttered. "A lot of scritch-scritch."

Layla gave him a profound look of pity and started counting symptoms off her fingers.

"Rambling, auditory hallucinations, memory loss..."

"It isn’t the Plague," he insisted.

"Catatonia—"

"I’m arguing with you! Hell, I’m not even injured. Quit it. There is no Plague, there never was!"

"Then why are you acting so weird?" Layla advanced on him a step. "Look us in the eye and tell us nothing happened."

"Nothing happened! The gun went off into the dirt and I’m fine. Look at me. Healthy as ever, in my prime teenage years."

Henry glanced at Layla. "...Delusions of grandeur is a symptom too, right?"

"I’m not delusional."

"Speak to me." The instructor caught the front of Milo’s coat, pulled him close, slapped his cheek, remembered his own advice about not touching the face, and backed away. "Where did the shot go?"

"There." Milo jabbed a finger beyond Henry’s shoulder, over the roadside where their boot marks ended in a broad strip of grass.

Henry squinted down the length of his arm. "Where?"

"Deeper in."

The instructor glanced back at the stretch of road where Milo had been when the pistol went off. Bare dirt the whole way to the grass.

"You fired from six paces back."

"Efficient shot."

Layla’s eyes dropped to his bad ankle. "How did it fire?"

"The ankle folded. I tripped."

"We heard the gun. We didn’t hear you fall."

"The gun was louder."

Henry raised the pistol by its grip. Moisture shone around the mouth of the barrel.

"Why is this wet?"

Milo swallowed, side-eyeing the lacquer.

"I coughed on it."

"You coughed into the barrel?"

"The wind was complicated."

Layla stepped between him and the grass. Her thumb swept the corner of his mouth and came away red.

"Milo." Her other hand tightened around the front of his coat, bunching the leather up into his chin. "Where was the barrel?"

"Pointed at the grass." Milo clenched a fist to stop it from shaking. "What’s with you? I survived a tornado-earthquake hybrid and you’re treating a cut cheek like a fatal wound."

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "Lacquer (Part 2)" ... ⤵︎ [!]